TREATING CUSTOMERS FAIRLY! – THAT’S A LAUGH

The Financial Services Authority launched an in initiative some years back called ‘Treating Customers Fairly’. The idea behind this was to make sure those companies dealing in the often murky and sometimes downright impenetrable world of financial services - aka treating other people’s money as their own - should be held to account in their dealings with customers.

All very laudable. Trouble is the FSA is as guilty as any financial services provider of letting down customers. Its attitude beggars belief. You would have thought that in the light of the sub-prime fiasco (a classic example of providers treating other people’s money as their own if ever there was one) the FSA might actually do more than just pay lip service to the Treating Customers Fairly initiative.

But no, not on your nelly. The latest example of Treating Customers Unfairly comes with the FSA’s bewildering and intensely annoying refusal to name the 19 firms that it has found to have been preying on consumers with misleading online advertising. That represents one in four companies letting down their customers.

Yet instead of naming and shaming the offenders the FSA says it will carry out another review – its fourth- and would take action if companies were still misleading customers.

The FSA, which is particularly good at hiding behind the rules of an increasingly regulated marketplace (its own regulations that is), says it is prevented from naming names under the confidentiality rules of the Financial Services and Markets Act. What absolute piffle.

The fact is that the FSA is clearly putting commercial interests ahead of the interests of customers. The FSA is responsible for consumer protection. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.